


Quietude

by Nabielka



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/F, Morning After, past Susan/Rabadash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 07:05:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nabielka/pseuds/Nabielka
Summary: A quiet morning after a ball. Aravis wakes up in Susan's bed.





	Quietude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lbmisscharlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/gifts).



When Aravis woke up, the Queen of Narnia was still sleeping. 

The sheets had slid down in the night. Perhaps she had been restless, burdened by the cares of state, or perhaps the Queen, raised in the cold winter that no Tarkheena had ever known, had only tucked them very loosely around herself. Her shoulder was revealed, enlarged by her training and freckled, and among the freckles something Aravis took to be a birthmark, if not quite like any she had ever seen. One breast, paler than her shoulder, was half uncovered.

Aravis pulled up her own side of sheets up to her chin. . To look at the Queen in this state made her too feel as though she were exposed. It had been easier, the night before, to not be self-conscious, with Queen Susan reaching for her, to not think that she had lost the muscle she’d once had in her legs, that in Anvard she did not ride as often or as hard as she had in Calavar. And yet to look at the Queen in this state sent a frisson of illicit excitement through her, though she had seen more of her scarce hours before. 

But in the morning light, she seemed a world apart from the woman who had taken Aravis to bed last night, for all that the evidence of their love-making was still there. As she lifted her head, pushing herself up on one elbow, there lay still within her line of sight her garments, which she had never quite learned to fold as neatly as her slaves in Calavar had, so that they would not crease. The Queen had taken care of that, hanging them up over the chair as though she herself was not attended in all other occasions, and had done so in such a way that Aravis had not been able to protest that it was beneath the Queen’s rank. 

She found it difficult still to think of her as Susan in the privacy of her own mind. During the day, her head bent over her papers or sitting with her back very straight in the throne room, it was not possible to forget the power she held. Even like this, her bedshirt loose and untied, her neck revealed by the fall of her hair, Aravis could not think of her only as her lover. 

But it was true, had been true for the past few nights, since one long night after a ball in honour of the Archenlander visit, when Queen Susan had tugged her by their joined hands into her chambers and pressed her up against the door. She had felt dizzy with affection and dizzier still from the kissing, and the door had made a creaking sound, making them both laugh. 

Having all that warm attention fixed on her had lent Aravis assurance, had made it possible to – not forget, exactly, for even in the cold North, where none fell to their knees or to prostrate themselves in front of the monarch, there was nevertheless a chasm that could not be breached – but to feel the difference between them less acutely. Even when she had been younger, there had been Tarkheenas, at times of better birth and position than Aravis herself, nevertheless amendable to an awkward adolescent fumble away from some party. The Queen Susan of last night, her mouth sweet with the aftertaste of mead, could almost have been one of them. 

The Queen Susan of this morning, at once more approachable and more set apart than any of them had been, was a bedmate of another sort altogether. Aravis was used to sleeping alongside another woman: it was the solitude of her rooms in Anvard that had fallen apart from the norm. In her childhood, it had been her nurse, then when she had grown to adolescence, an attendant. But the Queen of Narnia she could not treat as she might a slavegirl, to be woken so that Aravis could take her pleasure off her. 

It was an interesting thought. Aravis shifted, feeling herself warm. 

She herself did not hear anything, but Susan’s eyes flew open and her head flew up, her elbow moving closer to her side so that she could push herself up.

Their eyes met. It lasted but a moment, and then Susan’s eyes left hers to scan around the room. Intruders or assassins, Aravis did not know, but it was clear that something in the line of Susan’s shoulders had relaxed by the time their eyes locked again. 

As far as Aravis knew, she had slept the whole night through, and yet Queen Susan still looked tired. There was a smudge of grey beneath her eyes and her face in general looked a little worn, not the fine gloss that had hung around her in the candlelight. If Aravis had been raised to greater consideration, had been a more patient lover with the prospect of many such morns ahead of her, she might have closed her own eyes and let the queen fall back into light sleep. 

But she had been raised in the fine palace of Calavar, the envy of many a lesser son of the Tisroc, fated to never know peace beneath the sun nor his father’s throne. She was of the blood of Tash, descendant of Ilsombreh Tisroc, a girl raised from childhood to nourish her own needs. She rolled over instead, so that she was pressed up close against Queen Susan and facing her fully, then swung one leg over with a nonchalant entitlement that was only a mask. 

She had never been in this position. Her experiences in Calormen had been all vertical, light kisses pressed against another’s mouth while standing or else cross-legged, and before it had been Queen Susan who had pressed her down against the bedsheets. But the queen accepted this change in position with equanimity, and returned Aravis’ kiss readily enough when their mouths brushed. 

She had not known it could feel like this. It had been easy to get caught up in it; Queen Susan’s attentions had made her head spin. But being on top was heady in a different way. She could lean down to kiss Susan and let her own hair fall down like a curtain around them; she could see closely he strands of the queen’s brows, the freckles dusting her skin. This close, one of them was revealed to half-cover a tiny scar, faint with time. 

There was a story she had been told as a child, of a Tarkheena who hid a scar upon her cheek. She could not remember the lines of it now, but only the faint impression of sitting in the shade somewhere, playing in the sand, and hearing someone tell her stories. Home, she supposed. 

She wondered if Prince Rabadash had heard it too, if he had had the same association. She wondered if he had ever been close enough to Susan to take any note of it at all. She herself had not much occasion to meet with Ahoshta Tarkhaan. If he had indeed met her completing sacrifices to Zardeenah in the woods, he would have known her only from her own confession and the obvious wealth of her clothing. If he had recognised anything about her features, it would have been her resemblance to her father. 

But it had not been like that; they had courted. Queen Susan had looked upon the Prince and had found him pleasing, much like she appeared to find Aravis pleasing now. She might have taken him to her bed in the Narnian custom, and he too might have had a knee down on either side of her body and have leaned in to kiss her. 

In all likelihood, he would not have waited for her to wake, having an assurance to their mating that Aravis lacked. Besides, she could not credit that a man who could speak of a woman in the way that she and Lasaraleen had heard him speak of the queen in the Tisroc’s grand palace could have ever made a patient lover. He might have shaken her awake, murmuring softly about how many duties awaited him – if he were more sensible, or more conscious of her rank, he would have said, them both – he might have pressed his body down against hers and awakened her with his attentions. Stirred her like the slave to his attention he had wanted to make of her, riding hard northwards. 

Susan pulled back. Something of Aravis’ thoughts, or perhaps only the fact of her partial distraction, must have come through. She strove to pull herself back into the moment, where it was only the two of them alone, and not think of whom she was replacing there. 

She put her hand up into the soft hairs at the back of Susan’s neck and leaned back in again,. But still the thought nagged at her, for though Susan’s hands were in her hair, her eyes again were closed. 


End file.
